Triple boot, 2 XP and Vista with NeoGrub

Ahmed

Member
Hi,

Great software. Been using EasyBCD for some time but just found out about NeoGrub being part of the later editions.

I have 3 OS. 2 XP in C & D drives (1 main OS, other experimental) and Vista in a 2nd drive (G). Also may later include a BartPE on one of the HDDs.

Is it possible to include all of these in the menu.lst or Vista Bootloader? Typically, the Vista bootloader just loads Vista directly, but if I want XP, the boot.ini comes up to select which of the 2 XPs I want. I want to eliminate this step to make it all under Vistas bootloader or in NeoGrubs menu.lst and load whatever OS I want directly. Possible?

Thanks.
 
Hi Ahmed,
You don't need a 2 level boot unless you're worried about protecting your Vista restore points. The second layer is to enable the insertion of some Hide/Unhide commands to achieve that protection.
However Guru does have a Beta release of a new routine which can do both in a one level boot.
http://neosmart.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1341
If you don't use "system restore" then you should just be able to point at all your OSs in the Vista boot using EasyBCD to "Add an Entry" to get the simple 1 level boot you want.

PS
Sorry Guru - your reply slipped in there while I was still typing !
 
Actually Terry, there is a problem with that. If you have multiple Windows XP entries, no matter which you choose in the Vista bootloader you'll be taken to a secondary menu (NTLDR) to pick between the XP entries. So if you want only one menu, you'll have to play hardball with NeoGrub.

Vista HnS fixes this by giving each XP entry its own NTLDR.
 
Thanks for your replies gentlemen. The Hide n Seek program looks exactly like the thing I'm looking for, must try it sometime. Just wondering though, since I've been playing around with grub loader and various menu entries, are there not hide/unhide options that can achieve something like this? And if my Vista partition was accidentally hidden by this program, can I fix it with a partition program's (acronis, etc) unhide feature?

Thanks once again.
 
Well, Vista HnS is a NeoGrub implementation that does the hiding/unhiding for you (you can also see the stickied topic for the manual steps involved in the process w/ NeoGrub instead).

To recover a hidden partition, use the bootlable Super GRUB Disk hosted in the wiki.
 
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